Montalbano's First Case and Other Stories

by Andrea Camilleri

  And if this is what happens in every normal sort of office, imagine the high percentage of accuracy the predictions (or forecasts, etc.) made in police stations and commissioners’ offices must have, since there, all personnel, without hierarchical distinction, are expressly trained and instructed to notice the tiniest clues, the slightest shifts in the wind, and draw the inevitable conclusions.

  The news of Montalbano’s promotion did not take him by surprise. It was all in due course, as they liked to say in those offices. It had already been a good while since he’d finished his period of apprenticeship as deputy inspector in Mascalippa, a godforsaken backwater in the Erean Mountains, under the command of Chief Inspector Libero Sanfilippo. But what had Montalbano worried was where they would now decide to send him—what, indeed, would be his next destination. For that word, destination, was very close to another: destiny. And a promotion most certainly meant a transfer. Which meant changing home, habits, friends: a destiny yet to be discovered. In all honesty, he was fed up with Mascalippa and the surrounding area—not with the inhabitants, who were no worse or better than anywhere else, having more or less the same proportion of hoodlums to honest folk, cretins to smart people as any other town in Sicily. No, quite frankly, he just couldn’t stand the landscape any longer. Mind you, if there was a Sicily he liked to look at, it was this same Sicily of arid, scorched earth, yellow and brown, where little clumps of stubborn green stuck out as if shot from a cannon, where little white dicelike houses clinging to the hillsides looked as if they might slide down below at the next strong gust of wind, where even the lizards and snakes on summer afternoons seemed to lack the will to take cover inside a clump of sorghum or under a rock, inertly resigned to their destiny such as it was. And above all he loved to look at the beds of what had once been rivers and torrents—at least that was what the road maps insisted on calling them: the Ipsas, Salsetto, Kokalos—whereas they now were nothing more than a string of sun-bleached stones and dusty shards of terra-cotta. So, yes, he liked to look at the landscape, but to live in it, day after day, was enough to drive a man crazy. Because he was a man of the sea. On certain mornings in Mascalippa, when he opened the window at daybreak and took a deep breath, instead of his lungs filling with air, he felt them emptying out, and he would gasp for breath the way he did after a long underwater plunge. No doubt the early morning air in Mascalippa was good, even special. It smelled of straw and grass, of the open country. But this was not enough for him; indeed it practically smothered him. He needed the air of the sea. He needed to savor the smell of algae and the faint taste of salt on his lips when he licked them. He needed to take long walks along the beach early in the morning, with the gentle waves of the surf caressing his feet. Being assigned to a mountain town like Mascalippa was worse than serving a ten-year jail sentence.

  On the same morning that a guy who had nothing at all to do with police stations and commissioners’ offices had predicted his transfer—the man was a government employee of a different sort; that is, the director of the local post office—Montalbano was summoned by his boss, Inspector Libero Sanfilippo. Who was a true cop, one of those who can tell at a glance whether the person in front of him is telling the truth or spouting lies. And even then, that is, in 1985, he already belonged to an endangered species. Like doctors who used to have what was called a “clinical eye” and could diagnose a patient’s malady at a glance—whereas nowadays if they don’t have dozens of pages of test results obtained by high-tech machines in their hands they can’t tell a goddamn thing, not even a good old-fashioned flu. Years later, whenever Montalbano happened to review the early years of his career in his head, he always put Libero Sanfilippo at the top of the list. Without appearing to want to teach him anything, the man had actually taught him a great deal. First and foremost, how to maintain one’s inner equilibrium when something terrible and shocking happens in front of you.

  “If you let yourself get carried away by any reaction whatsoever—dismay, horror, indignation, pity—you’re screwed,” Sanfilippo would repeat every time. But Montalbano had managed to follow this advice only in part, because at times, despite his great efforts, he was overwhelmed by his feelings and emotions.

  Secondly, Sanfilippo had shown him how to cultivate the “clinical eye” that he so envied in his boss. But, here too, Montalbano could only absorb so much of his example. Apparently that sort of Superman X-ray vision was for the most part a natural gift.

  The negative side of Inspector Sanfilippo—at least in the eyes of former ’60s radical Montalbano—was his utter, blind devotion to every sort of instituted Order with a capital O. The established Order, the public Order, the social Order. In his early days in Mascalippa, Montalbano wondered in bewilderment how a rather cultured gentleman like his superior could have such an ironclad faith in an abstract concept which, the moment you translated it into reality, took the form of a billy club and a pair of handcuffs. The inspector got his answer the day when, by chance, his boss’s identity card ended up in his hands. The man’s full name was Libero Pensiero Sanfilippo. That is, “Free Thinking” Sanfilippo. Madonna santa! Names like Libero Pensiero, Volontà (“Will”), Libertà, Palingenesi (“Rebirth”), and Vindice (“Avenger”) were what anarchists used to like to give to their sons and daughters! The chief inspector’s father must certainly have been an anarchist, and his son, just to be contrary, not only had become a cop but had also acquired a fixation for Order, in an ultimate attempt to annul his paternal genetic inheritance.

  “Good morning, sir.”

  “Good morning. Please close the door and sit down. You can smoke, but don’t forget the ashtray.”

  Right. Because, aside from Order with a capital O, Sanfilippo also loved order with a small o. If even a little ash fell outside the ashtray, the chief would start squirming in his chair and grimacing. It made him suffer.

  “How’s the Amoruso-Lonardo case coming along? Any progress?” Sanfilippo began.

  Montalbano balked. What case? Filippo Amoruso, a seventy-year-old retiree, while refashioning the edge of his vegetable garden, had shifted it slightly, eating up barely three inches of the bordering vegetable garden of one Pasquale Lonardo, an eighty-year-old retiree. Who, when apprised of the fact, had claimed, in the presence of others, to have engaged several times in sexual congress with the deceased mother of Amoruso, known far and wide to have been a big slut. At which point Amoruso, without so much as a peep, had stuck a three-inch stiletto blade into Lonardo’s belly, without, however, taking into account the fact that at that same moment Lonardo was holding a mattock, with which he dealt him a vicious blow to the head before collapsing to the ground. Both men were now in the hospital, charged with disorderly conduct and attempted murder. Inspector Sanfilippo’s question, in all its uselessness, could therefore mean only one thing: that the chief was taking a roundabout approach to the subject he wanted to discuss with Montalbano, who assumed a defensive position.

  “It’s coming along,” he said.

  “Good, good.”

  Silence descended. Montalbano shifted his left buttock about an inch forward and crossed his legs. He did not feel at ease. There was something in the air that made him nervous. Meanwhile, Sanfilippo had pulled his handkerchief out of his trouser pocket and was buffing the surface of the desk with it, making it shinier.

  “As you know, yesterday afternoon I went to Enna—the commissioner wanted to speak to me,” he said all in one breath.

  Montalbano uncrossed his legs and said nothing.

  “He told me I’d been promoted to deputy commissioner and would be transferred to Palermo.”

  Montalbano felt his mouth go dry.

  “Congratulations,” he managed to say.

  Had he called him in only to tell him something that everybody and his dog had already known for at least a month? Sanfilippo took off his glasses, looked at the lenses against the light, then put them back on.

  “Thank
you. He also told me that within two months, at the most, you too will be promoted. Had you heard any mention of this?”

  “Yeth,” Montalbano exhaled.

  He couldn’t form the letter S, his tongue having sort of solidified, and was as tense as a bowstring, ready to spring forward.

  “The honorable commissioner asked me if it might not be a good idea for you to take my place.”

  “Here?!”

  “Of course, here in Mascalippa. Where else?”

  “Bu . . . bu . . . bu . . .” said Montalbano.

  It wasn’t clear whether he was babbling incoherently or simply stuck on the word but. This was what he’d been fearing! The moment he entered Inspector Sanfilippo’s office he’d expected this very bit of bad news! And his boss had not failed to deliver it. In a flash he saw the landscape of Mascalippa and environs pass before his eyes. Magnificent, yes, but for him it just wasn’t the thing. For good measure, he also saw four cows grazing on parched, wilted grass. He shivered, as if sick with malaria.

  “But I told him I didn’t agree,” said Sanfilippo, smiling at him.

  But did his son of a bitch of a boss want to give him a heart attack? To see him writhing and gasping for air in his chair? In spite of the fact that he was one step away from a nervous breakdown, Montalbano’s polemical instincts got the better of him.

  “Would you please explain why you think it’s a bad idea for me to work as inspector in Mascalippa?”

  “Because you’re utterly incompatible with the environment here.”

  Sanfilippo paused, smiled faintly, then added: “Or, more precisely, the environment is incompatible with you.”

  What a great cop Sanfilippo was!

  “When did you realize it? I’ve never done anything to show—”

  “Oh, you certainly have! And how! You’ve never talked about it, never said anything, I’ll grant you that. But you certainly showed it! Barely two weeks after you were first assigned here, I understood everything.”

  “But how did I show it, for Chrissake?”

  “I’ll give you one example. Do you remember the time we went to question some peasants in Montestellario and we accepted an invitation to eat with a family of shepherds?”

  “Yes,” said Montalbano, teeth clenched.

  “They set the table outside. It was a beautiful day, and the mountaintops were still covered with snow. Remember?”

  “Yes.”

  “You sat there with your head down. You didn’t want to look at the landscape. They gave you some fresh ricotta, but you muttered that you weren’t hungry. And then the father of the family said that one could see the lake that day, and he pointed to a distant spot far below, a little jewel sparkling in the sunlight. I asked you to come and have a look. You obeyed, but immediately closed your eyes and turned pale. You didn’t eat a thing. Then there was that other time when—”

  “Please, that’s enough.”

  Sanfilippo was having fun playing cat and mouse with him. To the point that he hadn’t even told him what the commissioner had finally said. Still shaken by the memory of that nightmarish day spent at Montestellario, he began to suspect that his boss still hadn’t mustered up the courage to tell him the truth. Which was that the commissioner had stuck to his original idea that Montalbano should be the inspector at Mascalippa.

  “So, in the end, the commissioner . . . ?” he ventured.

  “In the end the commissioner what?”

  “What did he say in response to your observation?”

  “He said he would think it over. But if you want to know my opinion . . .”

  “Of course I want to know your opinion!”

  “In my opinion, I persuaded him. He’ll let the higher-ups decide where to send you.”

  What would be the irrevocable decision of the Higher-Ups, those Supreme Gods and Deities who, like all self-respecting deities, were headquartered in Rome? This troubling question was preventing Montalbano from properly savoring the suckling pig that Santino, the restaurateur, had proudly prepared for him the day before.

  “You’re disappointing me today,” said Santino, slightly offended, having watched him eat listlessly.

  Montalbano threw up his hands in a gesture of resignation.

  “Forgive me, Santì, I just don’t feel right.”

  Walking out of the trattoria, he immediately found himself fumbling about in the void. When he’d gone inside to eat, the sun was out, and in little more than an hour, a dense, gloomy fog had descended. That’s what Mascalippa was like.

  He started walking home with a heavy heart, dodging head-on collisions with other human shadows by sidestepping at the very last instant. Darkness in the daytime, darkness inside him. While walking he made a decision he knew was final and irrevocable: If by any chance they assigned him to another town like Mascalippa, he would resign. And he would become a lawyer, or a legal aide, or the office manager of a law firm, so long as it was by the sea.

  He lived in a small two-room rental flat, with kitchen and bathroom, right in the middle of town so that he wouldn’t have to see any trace of mountains or hills when looking out the window. There was no central heating, and despite the four electrical space heaters that he never turned off, on certain winter evenings all he could do was get into bed and cover himself entirely but for one arm, which he kept outside the blankets to hold a book. He’d always liked to read and then reflect on what he had read, and for this reason the two rooms were overflowing with books. He was capable of starting a book in the evening and then reading till dawn, without interruption, in order to finish it. Luckily there was no danger that he would be summoned in the middle of the night for any violent crimes. For some inexplicable reason, killings, shootings, and violent brawls always seemed to happen during the day. And there was hardly any need for investigations; the crimes were all without mystery: Luigi shot Giuseppe over a matter of money and confessed; Giovanni knifed Martino over a question of adultery and confessed. And so on. If he wanted to use his brain, Montalbano was forced to solve the rebuses in the Settimana Enigmistica, which had a whole week’s worth of puzzles. At any rate, at least his years in Mascalippa, spent beside a man like Sanfilippo, were not time wasted. On the contrary.

  That day, however, the idea of spending the evening lying in bed reading, or watching some idiocy on TV, seemed unbearable to him. At that hour Mery was home from the school where she taught Latin. He’d met her at university, during the years of protest. They were the same age, or almost: She was four months younger. They’d liked each other at once, at first sight, and quickly they’d gone from a sort of amiable affection to an absolutely open, amorous friendship. Whenever they desired each other they would call one another and meet. Then they drifted apart and fell out of touch. In the mid-’70s Montalbano learned that Mery had got married and that her marriage had lasted less than a year. He ran into her by chance one day in Catania, on Via Etnea, during his first week on the job in Mascalippa. In a moment of despair he had jumped into the car and driven for an hour to Catania with the intention of seeing a first-run film, since the movies that made it to Mascalippa were all at least three years old. And there, inside the movie house, as he waited in line to buy his ticket, he’d heard someone call his name. It was Mery, who was just coming out of the theater. And if she’d been a beautiful girl in full flower before, maturity and experience had now made her beauty more composed, almost secret. In the end Montalbano didn’t get to see his film. He’d gone to Mery’s place, where she lived alone with the intention of never marrying again. Her one experience of marriage had more than sufficed. Montalbano spent the night with her and headed back to Mascalippa at six o’clock the following morning. Thereafter it had become a sort of habit of his to go to Catania at least twice a week.

  “Hi, Mery. It’s Salvo.”

  “Hi. You know what?”

  “What?”

 
“I was just about to call you myself.”

  Montalbano became disheartened. Want to bet Mery wanted to tell him they couldn’t get together because she was busy that evening?

  “Why?”

  “I wanted to ask if you could come a little earlier than usual, so we could go out to dinner. Yesterday a friend of mine from work took me to a restaurant that—”

  “I’ll be at your place by seven-thirty, okay?” Montalbano cut her off, so happy he was practically singing.

  The restaurant was called, rather unimaginatively, Il Delfino. But the imagination lacking in their sign was abundant in their cooking. There were some ten antipasti, all rigorously seafood, and each more heavenly than the last. The polipetti alla strascinasale melted even before touching the palate. And what to say about the grouper cooked in an angelic sauce whose various ingredients Montalbano was unable to identify in full? And then there was Mery, who when it came to eating was just as much of a bon vivant as he was. For if, when you are eating with gusto, you don’t have a person eating with the same gusto beside you, the pleasure of eating is as though obscured, diminished.

  They ate in silence. Every so often they looked each other in the eyes and smiled. At the end of the meal, after the fruit, the lights in the place went dim and then off. One of the clients protested. Then out of the kitchen door came a waiter pushing a cart carrying a cake with a single lighted candle on it and a bucket with a bottle of champagne in it. Bewildered, Montalbano noticed that the waiter was coming to their table. The lights came back on, and all of the customers applauded as a few of them cried out:

  “Happy birthday!”

  Surely it must be Mery’s birthday. And he’d completely forgotten. What a heel he was! What an airhead! But he could do nothing about it. He was simply incapable of remembering dates.

  “I . . . I’m so sorry. I forgot today was . . . your . . .” he said, embarrassed, taking her hand.